I started digging into JavaScript development a little over a year ago. I built my first JS app with jQuery and Ractive. Ractive is, as they say, a template-driven UI library which gives you an easy way to build interactive applications (front-ends) very easily and quickly. I chose Ractive without any spesific reason. I checked out their interactive guide (which is very good!!) and started hacking. I didn’t know basically anything about JavaScript app development or the multitude of frameworks you can use to wire-up things so I picked the first one that seemed to do the job pretty nicely. Ractive was also something that I, myself, could understand easily. The way it worked really fitted into my thinking so it was easy to build different sorts of things with it.
Six months ago my work buddy wanted to hack something together and he started out with Ractive since I knew it and I could help him a bit. There was something he didn’t like about in Ractive (documentation being one) and he searched for something else. He ended up doing his exercise with Vue which has a couple of things in common with Ractive, eg. {{Mustache}} templating. Vue.js, as the man behind it puts it, is a front-end framework that consists of a core view layer and accompanying tools & supporting libraries.
During the past couple of months I got really interested in Vue and have had this longing feeling of a need to learn something new. Enter Vue 2.0 announcement, a couple of hours of weekend hacking for an MVP, and I’m hooked. It plays nicely with the way I think and seems to be a rich framework with a massive community. They have all the bells and whistles one could ask for and they’re moving forward at a constant pace. Their documentation is good, too.
My plan now is to hop on to the Vue 2.0 train as it nears arrival in late May or early June. I’m sure I cannot hold my fingers of the keyboard until then so I’ll probably have a bit of experience when 2.0 beta ships and the accompanying tools are upgraded. I’m really excited and I already have one little project and an idea (that still needs some working on the edges) for another one in mind.
Bring it on.